Wednesday, 31 August 2016

Tonight we talk with Christopher David and Eric Green of Arcade City about the App launch tomorrow September 1st at the Jackalope Bar on 6th Street in Austin Tx. Then Jason King of Unsung.org joins in to talk about the latest success Unsung has had with the Arcade City community in Austin. The gamification of the Arcade City model is a main focus point of this show.Original air date 8/31/16 on LogosRadioNetwork

This September, blockchain hubs across North America will be giving out bitcoin to begin the next school year. Over a dozen regions including New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston in the United States and Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa, in Canada, are preparing their events. The giveaway, known as a Bitcoin Airdrop, has become a yearly tradition on university campuses.

The bits are to be given to students who come out to their local blockchain club’s first meeting. Students will also be introduced to concepts about bitcoin and the blockchain through their peers and a demonstration of a wallet creation and transfer.

History of the Airdrop

The first airdrop was hosted in 2014 by the MIT Bitcoin Club, after the club raised $500,000 worth of bitcoin to give to each incoming freshman. The event was then replicated in 2015 in Montreal by the McGill Cryptocurrency Club during their school’s frosh week, with donations given to the club. The Blockchain Education Network is now expanding the initiative throughout their network of regional hubs.

Why an Airdrop?

An airdrop allows people who would otherwise never have heard about bitcoin to try out using their first bits with their friends in a setting where their questions can be answered. Even if a student downloads a wallet and sells the bitcoin, they discover how easily it can be exchanged for fiat currency and would be more open to receiving bitcoin as payment at a future time.

Focus on Education

The Blockchain Education Network (BEN) believes that the blockchain revolution must happen through education. Most people are still unfamiliar with what digital currencies and the blockchain are, though almost everyone is curious when they first hear about it and want to learn more.

Bitcoin and blockchains are technologies with broad socio-economic impacts, which means that different parts of the world will have a different perspectives on it. BEN organizes as a swarm, a decentralized organizational model, to ensure that the education presented at each meeting is relatable to the region.

A Crucial Grassroots Movement for Students

BEN is comprised primarily of students aged 18-25 and the group believes that it is especially important for this demographic to be able to experiment with these technologies. The world is quickly moving into a sharing economy where people can operate remotely and companies have access to a global talent pool. Students will all enter the workforce after graduating and must be familiar with new technology.

Each year, the leadership from a university club graduates and must be replaced by the incoming class of students. Doing an airdrop at the beginning of each school year ensures a strong interest in blockchain technology and many new students joining the blockchain community in every region that participates.

In addition to the airdrop, BEN has an entire Fall 2016 initiative to bring new students into the blockchain ecosystem including a Blockchain Olympics event in October and a Blockchain Startup Gauntlet in November. BEN also hosts and promotes hackathons for students with a variety of skill sets, and assists students who are interested in attending bitcoin and blockchain conferences.

Future Implications

This initiative has become a tradition that can scale as wide as its reach. 500 students receiving bitcoin this September may not change the world; however, each year showing a new group of motivated university students how this technology works may cause a ripple effect of education that reaches farther than our expectations.

In our view, the “blockchain revolution” isn’t so far fetched. This is a technology which better maps to our worldviews after having grown up with the internet. It has taken 25 years for the internet to move from creation to our pockets. Through this historical lens, we see any current shortcomings of blockchain as an opportunity for our generation to solve.

Get Involved

BEN is always looking for new industry partners and leaders of local bitcoin or blockchain hubs who would like to participate in their global network. If you would like to be involved, the best way is to join the conversation in their Slack channel. Sponsors or regions who want to participate in the airdrop should reach out to the BEN directors directly at contact@blockchainedu.org.

This guest post was co-written by Michael Gord, creative director, and Dean Masley, executive director of the Blockchain Education Network.

In 2015 Bitcoin Magazinecovered the launch of the fintech company Symbiont, focused on fostering a symbiotic relationship between traditional financial markets and cryptographic blockchain technology. The company raised $1.25 million of seed funding from influential financial market leaders, then in January it closed a $7 million funding round. In May, Bitcoin Magazinereported that Symbiont is working with Delaware, the state that incorporates most companies, to explore the use of blockchain technology to make its paperwork cheaper and more efficient.

Now, Symbiont has announced that it has appointed Caitlin Long as President and Chairman of the Board of Directors. Long, a financial heavyweight with 22 years of corporate finance experience including stints at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, will be responsible for commercializing Symbiont's blockchain technology, encompassing business strategy and client relationships.

"Caitlin brings a rare mix of deep Wall Street experience and recognized thought leadership about blockchain technology. She is the embodiment of our name and brand," said Mark Smith, CEO and co-founder of Symbiont. "Caitlin has a strong philosophical and economic foundation that allowed her to build her career by always putting the needs of her clients first. She has repeatedly proven her ability to help clients see new ways to solve problems and clients rewarded her with top market positions in every one of her businesses. We are thrilled that she's joining our team."

"Blockchain technology will make capital markets safer, fairer and more efficient," said Long. "I chose to join Symbiont because we have better technology and are ahead of our peers. Symbiont offers the only smart contracts platform purpose-built for financial services. Investors will actually own the assets issued on Symbiont's blockchain, which is a huge improvement relative to how securities are owned today."

"Our priority from here is to broaden the market reach of our tech. It works and is already going into production,” Long told Bitcoin Magazine. “We think the performance numbers we disclosed today will garner a lot of attention from potential consumers, many of whom are kicking the tires on this new technology."

One of the two main reasons that motivated Long’s decision to join is that investors will actually own the assets issued on Symbiont’s blockchain which, according to Long, is a huge improvement relative to how securities are owned in today’s market structure. The second reason is that Symbiont’s platform can store all transaction data and documentation in a secure, anonymous manner without sacrificing speed.

“Symbiont’s ledger is currently processing 80,000 transactions per second in a single region and tens of thousands per second globally. Plus, transaction latency is on the order of milliseconds. So Symbiont’s software is not just outperforming all competitors whose comparable statistics we know — it’s outperforming them by multiple orders of magnitude.”

Symbiont was co-founded by members of the Counterparty project who had participated in the first development phase of Overstock’s “cryptostock” exchange, Medici, now known as t0. Overstock wants t0 to become an alternative to traditional stock exchanges like the NYSE or Nasdaq, said Judd Bagley, Overstock communications director and t0 Chief Evangelist in a Distributed interview.

The Hyperledger Project, an initiative of the Linux Foundation, is also developing an enterprise-grade, open-source distributed ledger framework and codebase. Hyperledger’s technology aims at clearing and settling transactions in real time, with a throughput of thousands of transactions per second. However, actual performances reported by developers on the Hyperledger mailing list are significantly lower, which seems to support Long’s claim.

Long notes that Symbiont, which has kept a low profile so far and prioritized building its technology to create a first-mover advantage, is already implementing its platform at a production level. “Our publicly disclosed customers include the State of Delaware (Delaware Public Archives project) and a top European insurance company (catastrophe swap pilot project),” says Long. “Other customers are not yet disclosed.”

Former Reddit Cryptocurrency Engineer, Ryan X. Charles, is currently working on a new, bitcoin-powered social network, but he isn’t focused on creating something that will only be used by the Bitcoin community. In a recent interview on Epicenter Bitcoin, Charles noted that creating an app used by a mainstream audience would have much more value than simply creating /r/Bitcoin with micropayments.

Charles’s new platform is called Yours and the main goal is to create a way for content creators to get paid for their digital content directly from their audiences. Although he used to work at Reddit, Charles has noted that Yours is not simply a decentralized version of that social media platform.

Finding a First Non-Bitcoin Community for Yours

During the interview, Charles made it clear that Yours is currently searching for the first key community or demographic that the platform should try to attract. “I’m sort of vague about this now, but who are our core users?” he questioned. “What is community number one here?”

The reason Charles is somewhat vague on this point is because Yours has not yet identified the community that they should target first. Although many people within the Bitcoin community have heard of Yours, this is very much an unknown project among the general public and even among the general tech community.

Some think it would make sense to first focus on the Bitcoin community as a core batch of users, but Charles was quick to dismiss this idea. “If we made Reddit but with Bitcoin, I bet Bitcoin users would use it; however, I don’t think it’s in anybody’s interest that we do this first.” said Charles. “Bitcoin users would probably most benefit from it if we create something mainstream.”

“Everybody in the Bitcoin space wins if we start servicing people outside the Bitcoin community,” Charles added.

Charles’s argument is essentially that they’ll learn much more about what they’re building if they go after a community that is unrelated to Bitcoin. This way, Yours will be better able to understand whether they’re solving a real world problem or just creating another Bitcoin community forum. By going this route, Yours will also be able to ensure that their platform is not so complex that it can only be used by bitcoiners.

“I think it’s really important that we identify one community to be our core audience [who] are not already Bitcoin users,” concluded Charles.

The Manga Example

Manga was the one area of interest that Charles brought up as an example of a community that may be interested in using Yours. “I’m not a big manga fan, but there are a lot of reasons why we think that audience might be good for us,” he said. “They’re really sort of young, sophisticated people that create manga, which are Japanese comics, and there are huge communities of these people . . . They’re creating content. They’re not really able to monetize this in any way, but if they had a way to monetize it, they would love to do this full time.”

Charles went on to explain that Yours could target the manga community by telling them they can earn real money by creating and discovering new, quality manga. He added that Yours could make sure that their product gave the manga community all of the tools they need to easily post and earn money from their art.

“I don’t want to say that manga would necessarily be the first user, but something like that,” added Charles. “It’s a niche community. It’s outside of Bitcoin. Not everyone likes manga, but the people that do like it really like it.”

Onboarding New Bitcoin Users via Yours

One last point on the mainstream adoption of Bitcoin and Yours that was discussed on this episode of Epicenter Bitcoin was the issues involved with onboarding new users to this decentralized payment system. “It’s still kind of difficult to get [bitcoin],” said Charles. “Wallets have improved a lot over the years, but they’re still kind of technically sophisticated.”

In the past, traditional online payment options have also had to deal with this onboarding issue. In the case of PayPal, they handled it by literally paying new users to join their platform. “That is not out of the question for us,” Charles said, regarding PayPal’s strategy. “If we raised a bunch of money, we could do that . . . I don’t think we necessarily have to do that though.”

It should be noted that those who wish to create or view content do not need to have any bitcoin to use Yours. The use of bitcoin is only required when a user wishes to support someone else’s content via a payment.

Charles also mentioned the Coinbase Buy Widget as another easy way to onboard new Bitcoin users. The widget allows users to instantly purchase up to $5 worth of bitcoin per day with limited Know Your Customer restrictions.

“You just have to make it fluid for the users to get on and off,” said Charles.

In January, Bitcoin Magazinereported that a public alpha technology preview of Zcash, “a decentralized and open-source cryptocurrency that aims to set a new standard for privacy and anonymity through the use of groundbreaking cryptography,” had been released on Github.

Zcash offers total payment confidentiality, while maintaining a decentralized network using a public blockchain. Unlike Bitcoin, Zcash transactions automatically hide the sender, recipient and value of all transactions on the blockchain. Only those with the correct view key can see the contents. Users have complete control and can opt-in to provide others with their view key at their discretion.

Now the Zcash team has announced that the time to release their code and launch the genesis block of the Zcash blockchain is getting close. “When the Zcash genesis block is launched, anyone in the world will be able to mine Zcash and users will be able to send it to anyone in the world with the advantage of full zero-knowledge privacy,” states the announcement. “Our aim in creating the Zcash blockchain is to launch the first open, permissionless financial system with zero-knowledge privacy and best achievable security.”

The launch target date for the Zcash blockchain is set for October 28, 2016. In the meantime, the team is busy with a technical audit, carried out with the help of external audit firms and hackers, to review its code and correct vulnerabilities.

Bitcoin Magazine reached out to Zooko Wilcox, Zcash founder and CEO, to find out more.

Zooko explained that the audit process is ongoing. “The external security consultants we're working with are real pros and we're already glad that we are doing this with them,” he said. “We're diagnosing and (in some cases) fixing issues as we go. We'll publish complete reports about everything that the auditors found and how we responded to each issue.”

“We've already spent tens of thousands of dollars on it and before the process is through, the cost may reach six figures. This is one of the many reasons why we needed to have funding to create Zcash.” In a more recent update, Zooko has confirmed that Zcash has already spent 6 figures on the security audits.

“Frankly, the results so far have left me uneasy about the security of Zcash,” admits Zooko. “The auditors haven't yet found any critical bugs that would allow a really harmful attack like remote theft of Zcash, but they have found bugs which could result in lesser damage (like denial-of-service), and many bugs which might be harmless or ‘might’ be vulnerable to exploitation and it's hard to tell which. The number of bugs we've found so far makes me think that there are more bugs left in the code that we haven't yet found. It's possible Zcash will follow the example of Bitcoin, where critical bugs were found and fixed in the software even after there was a live blockchain and real money depending on it. This is one of the reasons why nobody should risk more money on Zcash than they can afford to lose.”

The first version that Zcash is releasing on October 28, 2016 is just a daemon and command-line tool that only runs on Linux. “That means there is no GUI at all, so you can't use it at all if you're not a Linux-wielding power user and it doesn't run at all on Mac or Windows,” explains Zooko.

Zooko hopes that that the makers of wallet software for Bitcoin and Ethereum will add Zcash support to their wallets and that they will do it faster and better than the Zcash team could. “After all, we're not GUI experts!” he told Bitcoin Magazine. “Our team has a world-class collection of skills in cryptography, infosec, cryptocurrencies, networking and distributed systems and so on, but GUI design and implementation is something we're lacking. I know that some of those wallet makers are already working on this. So, write to your favorite wallet maker today and ask them to add Zcash support!”

Similarly, the Zcash team doesn’t intend to provide a Zcash exchange for bitcoin and fiat. Some of the existing cryptocurrency exchanges around the world are adding Zcash support, but Zooko isn’t at liberty to disclose which ones yet. “Write to your favorite one and request it,” is Zooko’s advice.

On Mining Zcash

How hard Zcash mining will be and whether it could be (at least initially) feasible for PC users without expensive extra hardware, can’t be known at this moment. “Our intent was to make Zcash mining feasible on commodity hardware, like your laptop when you aren't using it overnight,” explains Zooko. “See this post for our reasons for choosing this Proof-of-Work algorithm. However, it is not yet clear to what degree we've succeeded at that, or whether custom mining implementations and large-scale mining operations will be more cost-efficient.”

“One of the external security auditors that we've hired — Solar Designer — is tasked with studying our Proof-of-Work algorithm and writing a report about this. We'll publish his report in full, just like the others.”

“I really hope that people run Zcash miners on their laptops and servers anyway, even if it isn't profitable, because it is a public service; it supports the decentralized network that provides a private, censorship-resistant, permissionless blockchain to everyone on the Internet.

“Even if this Proof-of-Work algorithm doesn't close the gap between your commodity laptop and a customized, large-scale mining operation, we've definitely succeeded at ‘narrowing’ the gap, so it is possible that a lot of volunteers running a miner on their commodity hardware will make it unprofitable to invest in building large-scale Zcash mining operations.

“If this approach doesn't work out and customized and scaled-up mining operations do come to dominate, that isn't the end of the world. Then we'll be in the same boat as Bitcoin and Ethereum, which isn't so bad.”

“When we were designing our mining algorithm, I started to think that there is some kind of fundamental trade-off between decentralization and resistance-to-51%-attack.

“With a wide variety of amateur miners using the idle resources of their commodity hardware (like Bitcoin in the early days), the blockchain is more vulnerable to 51% attack, but it is highly decentralized. With a small number of professional miners with specialized mining operations (like Bitcoin today), it is less decentralized, but it is stronger against 51% attack. (Because of the greater scale and because the miners have a capital investment tied to the value of the coin, which incentivizes them to protect the value of the coin.)

“We decided to aim for decentralization instead of aiming for 51%-attack-resistance, but if we miss decentralization and we hit 51%-attack-resistance, that's not too bad!”

Enhancing Privacy in Digital Currency

Zooko explained that he doesn’t consider privacy as a property of a single transaction, but rather as an emergent property from a sequence of transactions among a group of people. “It's sort of an inherently social construct in that way; privacy is something you can only get in groups,” he said. “If you buy some Zcash with bitcoin, everyone will be able to see — on the Bitcoin blockchain — to what Bitcoin address you sent your bitcoin (for example, to the address of an exchange that will allow you to trade bitcoin for Zcash). If you then spend your Zcash on something private (say, paying your employees's salaries, or buying psychiatric treatment) using a Zcash private transaction, nobody will be able to see, just by looking at the Zcash blockchain, what you spent it on.”

Zooko is persuaded that a Zcash economy could emerge in the long term. “The dream is that people all around the world use Zcash and other cryptocurrencies directly, to cooperate and organize with one another in safety and privacy,” he told Bitcoin Magazine. “This will give them freedom from corrupt regimes, banks and unstable national currencies.”

Zooko imagines that this is a long-term type of dream that will come true in time. “When it does start happening, it could happen fast, but it might be years or decades before it begins. It might even turn out that the tipping point for this new way of cooperating and organizing won't be the cash-like functionality that we currently emphasize, but instead, new features like custom tokens, multisig, Distributed Autonomous Organizations and other sorts of ‘smart contracts’.”

“Eventually I imagine these sorts of technologies will become part of the fabric of our society, like the Internet has become during my lifetime.”

Zooko strongly objected to the suggestion of “the inevitable use of Zcash to buy child porn or fund the ISIS.” This is what he said:

“I don't even think it is a valid question. It's kind of a ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’ question. I don't think it is ‘inevitable’ that child pornographers and ISIS will use Zcash. ISIS is currently working on deploying 8th century technology. If they ever start to use blockchain technology like Bitcoin and Zcash, it will be because it has become part of the fabric of our society, like the Internet, so that bad guys (along with everyone else) can hardly not use it.”

Continuing the Unfinished Revolution

Zooko added that he remembers when the Internet was new and there was a lot of hand-wringing about how it might be used for crime. “I think that story faded away approximately when the first generation of digital natives started reading news,” he said. “Younger people today don't appear to know that there was a time when the Internet was a scary new technology that should be regulated or banned in order to prevent crime.”

“We first wanted to push outward the boundaries of human knowledge by scientific exploration,” concludes Zooko. “ Now these scientific discoveries (by us and many, many others) look like they can radically empower people — individuals, small groups, and also giant organizations like corporations and governments.

“The Internet is an unfinished revolution. I remember what the world was like before the Internet. You didn't talk to people from other countries! National boundaries were communication boundaries. And you couldn't talk to or share information with almost all of the people in your own country, either. You were dependent on a small number of personal acquaintances and information gatekeepers.

“The Internet changed all that, and it changed the world, and it changed all of our lives for the better. The myriad ways that the Internet has remade and improved our lives is impossible to even measure.

“But it is an unfinished revolution, because although it allows you to share information with potentially billions of people, it doesn't provide a way for you to organize with them. You can't cooperate with them to allocate resources. You can't pool your resources with them, you can't help them pay their bills or make sure they get food, such as by hiring them, buying something from them, or donating to them. And they can't do that for you. You can't enter into an enforceable agreement (a contract) with a group of people, unless your group fits into a product from the small number of gatekeepers that control such possibilities.

“What is our role in history? I want to be able to look back and say that we played even a small part in reigniting the unfinished revolution. I want to be able to say we were there, pushing for that great transformation that began to wash away the suffocating mass of inefficiency, corruption, and isolation — the transformation that unlocked the potential of billions of humans who had been trapped behind walls — cooperation boundaries! If we can help that happen, and help it happen sooner, before it is too late for so many people, then it will have been worth it, whatever else happens.”

Ethereum Classic’s ability to gain a somewhat sizeable market share in terms of price and network hashrate has been surprising to many in the digital currency ecosystem, but the darling of blockchain immutability may soon face an issue with new coins coming onto the market from those who may not have that particular blockchain’s best interests at heart.

Over the course of the next week, two things will happen. First, roughly 4.1 million ETC will be made available for withdrawal this morning, August 30, from the so-called “White Hat DAO,” which is a child DAO created by a group of individuals working to protect DAO token holders from bad code that allowed an attacker to partially drain The DAO of its ETH (and now ETC) holdings. The DAO token holders who receive these funds will be able to sell the ETC for ETH or any other asset on the open market for the first time since the Ethereum hard fork. The process of allowing DAO token holders to withdraw their ETC has been taken over by Switzerland-based digital currency exchange Bity.

In addition to the White Hat DAO withdrawals, the attacker who originally drained The DAO of some of its ether holdings will also finally be in full control of those funds on the ETC chain on September 2nd. According to Bity Legal Manager, Alexis Roussel, the attacker has access to one child DAO, which holds roughly 5 percent of all ETC in circulation.

Problems With the White Hat DAO

Although DAO token holders will soon have access to some of their ETC holdings, the White Hat Group originally had control of about 7.2 million ETC. The plan was to convert the salvaged ETC to ETH in order to do what the White Hat Group thought was in the best interest of DAO token holders. Articulated reasons for taking this course of action included threat of replay attacks on the ETH chain, a lack of block explorers and other necessary tools on the ETC chain and potential hashpower or speculator-based attacks on the ETC chain.

Some have argued that this attempt to convert the White Hat DAO’s ETC to ETH amounts to an attack on ETC.

Roughly 14 percent of the ETC controlled by the White Hat Group has been converted to ETH and other currencies, but Poloniex and Kraken froze the White Hat Group’s accounts before allowing them to continue with their plan. Representatives from Bity have reached out to Kraken and Poloniex on multiple occasions, but the exchanges have not responded with any sort of reasoning as to why the accounts have been frozen.

Roussel added that Bity is a regular user of Kraken and they have always responded to their inquiries in the past. An email from Bitcoin Magazine to Kraken CEO Jesse Powell was not returned, but Powell recently commented on the matter via Reddit. His comments appear to indicate that an investigation into the White Hat Group’s actions may be the reasoning behind the freezing of the accounts.

“Unfortunately, we're not the only ones who thought the bizarre actions of the ‘white hat’ group warranted additional scrutiny,” said Powell. “We're presently seeking approval from other interested parties to let the funds go out to the withdraw contract.

“When we can't say what's going on, you can probably guess what's going on,” continued Powell in another comment. “I wish I could say more. It's our goal to get the coins back to their rightful owners. [The White Hat Group's] earlier antics drew a lot of attention that has substantially complicated the matter.”

At this point, 28 percent of the White Hat DAO’s funds are held by Poloniex and 16 percent are held by Kraken.

The Effect on the ETC Price

When the initially available White Hat DAO funds are combined with The DAO attacker’s holdings, the result is that nearly 10 percent of the entire ETC supply is going to be able to be sold for the first time by September 2nd. This could potentially have a significant and negative impact on the ETC price and market cap. “I cannot speculate as to what the DAO attacker will do, but supply and demand calls for a price drop,” Brave New Coin Head of Research, Tone Vays, told Bitcoin Magazine.

When asked for his opinion on what DAO token holders will do when they gain access to their ETC for the first time, Roussel told Bitcoin Magazine, “I have no clue.”

“The market is a mechanism to allocate scarce resources in the most efficient way,” said Ethereum Classic Project Spokesperson, Arvicco. “If there is indeed ‘a massive dump’ as many people fear (or hope), it will just serve to re-allocate the ETC from people who do not understand Ethereum Classic’s value proposition to those who do. Just as a much much bigger initial dump of ETC tokens upon introduction of exchange trading did.”

“I don’t see a lot of potential for a massive dump.” Arvicco added.

The ETC price has been on a steady decline throughout the month of August.

Thank you to Bity Legal Manager Alexis Roussel for his assistance with this article.

Monday, 29 August 2016

In the last 20 years, content publishing platforms have proliferated to an almost insane number. There are countless places where people and companies can post articles, blogs, videos, photos, live content and so on. Despite this diverse offering, little innovation has happened in monetizing content, which still mostly remains ad-based.

We're joined by Ryan X. Charles, Bitcoin Developer and Founder of Yours. Yours would like to address the monetization problem by allowing content producers to earn Bictoin when they create good content. Yours is an in-browser application which implements a Bitcoin wallet and enables micro-transactions through their own implementation of the Lightning Network. Content Creators are paid by Curators who attribute value to the content. Curators are themselves rewarded when content they find valuable goes viral.

Topics discussed in this episode:

Ryan's background as the Lead Developer of BitCore, and his experience at BitGo and Reddit

Bitcoin prices are fun, if you like roller coasters. For traders who see volatility as an opportunity to make money and are willing to accept the risks, this is great. However this volatility presents a risk for long-term investors, fund managers and businesses who use digital currency for day-to-day operations. The newly launched algorithm for Bitcoin trading, TWAP (Time Weighted Average Price), could save both money and headaches for people and companies not equipped for higher risk.

Benchmarking Your Trades

On January 15, 2016 at 21:58 GMT (Figure 1), the price for bitcoin was $390. In an hour, it dropped to $365. I’m sure you have your own annoying price drop stories. This kind of volatility creates multiple challenges. First, it increases risk; and second, it makes it difficult for your stakeholders to know whether you are providing them a fair price.

Companies using Bitcoin for operations rely on the price of bitcoin. If in one hour — about the time it takes for six confirmations — the price of BTC can swing by 7 percent (and it does!), companies need to add a buffer to account for it. Thus, volatility increases the overall cost of using digital currency.

Stakeholders care about your Bitcoin trading strategies. This includes the CFOs of firms (e.g. Bitcoin mining firms), your limited partners, suppliers, merchants and customers who are relying on you to get them the best price. Using digital currency is risky enough for customers, and asking them to take on additional trading risk is cumbersome. They don’t ask you to predict the market but they do ask that you give them a fair rate.

One way to evaluate and communicate your performance is to use a benchmark. A good benchmark averages out the volatility and provides you with a price that your stakeholders can trust. Digital currency fund managers, for example, use benchmarks to evaluate their trading strategies and make sure they are not undertaking additional risk. Payment companies who have inflows of digital currency throughout the day often use a benchmark rate to communicate to their customers.

How TWAP Works

To gauge trading performance, many traders in different asset classes (equity, fixed income, currency) often use average price as a benchmark. The two common ways to calculate an average are a time-weighted average price (TWAP) and a volume-weighted average price (VWAP). TWAP is the average price of a bitcoin over the course of a specified period of time and VWAP is price multiplied by number of bitcoins traded, and then divided by the total number of bitcoins traded during a time period.

While these benchmarks are great, they are not very useful if you can’t trade on those prices. If you have to commit to a benchmark and don’t have any tools to make sure you can get that price when trading, you are now exposing yourself to additional risk. To solve the problem, we propose a time-weighted average price algorithm which will get you as close as possible to TWAP.

The algorithm trades over the desired time, either 1, 6, 12 or 24 hour(s), and will give you a TWAP over that time period. For example, if you set the TWAP algorithm to sell 12 bitcoins over 12 hours, the algorithm will sell throughout the period, aiming to get a 12-hour TWAP.

How Good Is It?

As good as a safety bar on a roller coaster. Using historical data, SFOX simulated how the TWAP algorithm would perform. We ran simulations on multiple days with high and low volatility. We also ran simulations at different lengths. Included below are two different simulations.

The x-axis represents specific minutes. At any given minute (time=0), a trader has a choice: she could trade now (open) or in an hour from now (close), or she could use a TWAP algorithm during that hour. The chart shows the open price (price you would get if you traded at a specific time), a close price (price one hour from the open price) and the TWAP price.

TWAP does exactly as expected — it gets an average price. We also included a VWAP graph to show you what the volume-weighted average price during that hour would be.

Our TWAP algorithm comes fairly close to VWAP and TWAP in the simulations. The performance of the algorithm depends on market conditions, liquidity, volatility, time of day and size of the order.

We also ran a simulation over a 12-hour period, given the option to trade at the beginning of the period (open), at the end of the 12-hour period (close) or using TWAP. Also provided for reference is the VWAP calculated over a one-hour period. As expected, TWAP came fairly close to the average price over a 12-hour period.

With TWAP, loss aversion bias can kick in. If bitcoin’s price moves +$30, the trader using TWAP to sell would have yielded a lower amount (~+$15) and thus may feel bad about “leaving money on the table.” Average doesn’t always feel good but keep in mind the trade-off yields stability and reduced risk.

We all want to minimize risk; however, the question is, are we willing to pay the price by settling for an average price? Many of us think we can time the market better than the rest (aka overconfidence bias). No one aspires to buy or sell at an “average” price. In an average, half the time you are on the winning side, while the other half of the time you are on the losing side. That means, given our loss aversion bias, the times when we lose will cause us to feel more pain. The fact is, risk mitigation is important and averages are a bedrock in that strategy. (It’s all risk vs. reward: lower the risk, lower the reward.) Think of TWAP as dollar cost averaging, an important tool to help minimize risk. You can’t predict where the market is going, so why put all your money in at once? If you don’t use TWAP and lose to the full price swing, you will feel even worse.

For a number of types of investors and strategies, TWAP is ideal — and especially so when trading a large number of bitcoins.

This is a guest post by Akbar Thobhani, CEO of SFOX. The opinions reflected are those of the author.

IBM is reorganizing its internal blockchain team into a business unit that encompasses its artificial intelligence and cloud computing efforts. Industry Platforms will be led by Bridget van Kralingen, IBM’s former senior vice president of Global Business Services. As part of the launch, IBM's entire blockchain leadership will make the transition to the unit, first announced […]

Sunday, 28 August 2016

In this Dash Across America update, we hear a speech John Bush gave at Jackalope Freedom Festival on Freedom Cells and Self Improvement. Freedom Cells are peer to peer mutual aid groups where members work together to secure their sovereignty. John spends the latter part of the speech talking about the role self improvement plays in creating a better world.

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Tonight Ladar Levison and Cliff Baltzley join us in studio for a technically difficult but fun time. Aside from the technical descriptions and technical difficulties with our network we had a great time and shared some great info. Very fun episode

Once upon a time, at the beginning of Bitcoin’s history, it was possible to mine bitcoin at home using a PC’s CPU. Later, miners had to switch to GPUs, then to ASICs and then to more and more sophisticated bitcoin mining equipment. Today, most mining is done in specialized mining farms, operated by a few large players that invest substantial money in hardware facilities located in places with low temperatures and low electricity costs. It would seem that the era of private mining is over and the trend toward professional mining is here to stay.

Early next week, however, Bitmain will launch the latest addition to its bitcoin mining product line, the Antminer R4, designed to address some of the hurdles that have kept home miners on the sidelines.

It’s worth noting that the advent of professional mining was foreseen by Satoshi Nakamoto himself in 2010. “The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale,” said Nakamoto. “That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don’t generate.”

It appears that Nakamoto was right. However, it’s important to remember that, besides generating cash from electric power, which is the objective of miners, distributed mining validates bitcoin transactions and maintains the blockchain. The distributed maintenance of the blockchain, crowdsourced with financial incentives, is what gives power and resiliency to the Bitcoin network. If, on the contrary, only a few large operators maintain the blockchain, then the network becomes de-facto centralized, and its stability is threatened by 51 percent attacks.

Therefore, bringing Bitcoin mining back to small miners at home seems to be a very good idea. It is, after all, still possible to mine at a profit, and those who invest in modern mining equipment can still recover their investment and make some extra money. However, modern mining rigs generate a lot of heat and make a lot of noise, which reduces the appeal of home mining.

Early next week, Bitmain will launch [ADD LINK TO PRESS RELEASE] the latest addition to its bitcoin mining product line, the Antminer R4. According to the company, the Antminer R4 will be the world’s most silent multi-terahash bitcoin miner. Bitmain is also launching a silent 2600W Power Supply Unit (PSU), the APW5, specially designed for high-performance mining.

The Antminer R4 [ADD LINK TO R4 BROCHURE] uses the power-efficient 16nm BM1387 ASIC chip for bitcoin mining. It can deliver a hashrate of 8.6TH/s with a power efficiency of 0.1J/GH at a noise level lower than 50dB. At an ambient temperature of 35°C, the R4’s noise level is 52dB. The BM1387 chip is built using TSMC's 16nm FinFET technology and delivers 0.098 J/GHs, which according to Bitmain makes it the world's most efficient bitcoin mining chip in the consumer market. Each Antminer R4 employs 126 BM1387 chips.

“The Antminer R4 has been designed with great care to ensure the least possible sound with the maximum hashrate,” notes the Bitmain press release. “It replaces the traditional miner fan with a rotary blade system inspired by the fan of a silent split air conditioner. The speed of this unique fan is automatically controlled to ensure that it never produces more sound than is absolutely necessary. The slim design of the Antminer R4 allows it to be conveniently placed in a book rack or on a computer table at home.”

For home users who wish to utilize the Antminer R4 with the optimum performance, Bitmain highly recommends that they use it with the APW5 power supply.

The APW5 is Bitmain’s most advanced PSU to date and is compatible with both the 220V power supply and the 110V power supply that is the standard in North America. With a 220V supply, it can deliver an output of 2600W. The APW5 combines high efficiency and good dynamic performance into a power dense package and also features overload, overheat, overcurrent and low voltage protection. The PSU is built for high-power performance and low noise. Like that of the R4, the APW5’s fan is automatically controlled so it only produces as much sound as is absolutely necessary.

“With the release of these products, Bitmain hopes to bring bitcoin mining back to homes and continue decentralizing the bitcoin mining network,” notes the Bitmain press release. With convenient high-performance mining rigs, Bitmain hopes that home miners will be better able to continue to play an essential role in the Bitcoin network.